The phonetic regionalisms in the spoken Polish of the Cracovian intelligentsia

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Regionalisms are the units of a linguistic system that represent the territorial variety of a literary language. Among them archaisms, neologisms, foreign language elements and colloquialisms can be distinguished. The prevailing part of regionalisms, however, originates from local folk dialects. The vast majority of regionalisms, mainly for their common appearance in the educated people’s language, have been accepted by the correct usage rules. There are also those considered inconsistent with the standards of the literary language. Both types can be found in the literary language of the Polish intelligentsia. Regionalisms can be divided into phonetic, inflectional, derivational, lexical and syntactic regionalisms. The most easily noticeable are the lexical ones; less evident, as hardly or simply not realizable, are the phonetic regionalisms. This article analyses evolutionary directions of three phonetic regionalisms that appear in the Polish of the Cracovian intelligentsia: the word sandhi voicing phonetic, the velar n pronunciation, as in the word panienka, and the simplified pronunciation of tsz, drz groups. The first two show the vanishing tendency, whereas the third one has an expansive character.